Groklaw is a collaborative site that explores the nuances of
certain cases and legal decisions, including the recent Apple v.
Samsung case.

The editor of the site, Pamela Jones, says she can't operate the
site without email.

And the idea that faceless government spooks might be reading any
email that she sends outside the U.S. is too much for her:

[T]he conclusion I've reached is that there is no way to
continue doing Groklaw, not long term, which is incredibly sad.
But it's good to be realistic. And the simple truth is, no matter
how good the motives might be for collecting and screening
everything we say to one another, and no matter how "clean" we
all are ourselves from the standpont of the screeners, I don't
know how to function in such an atmosphere. I don't know how to
do Groklaw like this.

Jones isn't just worried about being wrongly accused of
crimes. For her, there's the ickiness factor of having her
personal privacy violated--a feeling that she says is similar to
the feeling she had when her apartment in New York was robbed and
the burglar went through all of her underwear. (She threw the
underwear away, unused, and moved to a different
apartment).

Jones also doesn't sound like a privacy zealot who rails
about 4th Amendment violations without ever addressing the
purpose of government surveillance programs--namely, to protect
the country from very real threats. Jones knew someone who was
supposed to have been in the Twin Towers on 9/11, and she doesn't
rationalize that attack as having been a one-off that could never
happen again. Unlike Edward Snowden, she also doesn't
condescendingly suggest that those of us whose privacy was
spectacularly violated on 9/11 and in Boston in April worry too
much about terrorism.

In other words, Jones doesn't sound like a crusader who has
decided to put one personal mission above all others. She sounds
like the sanctity of her personal space is more important to her
than it might be to others (other people might just have washed
their underwear, instead of throwing them away, for example, or,
like Jones's neighbors, been resigned to the fact that New York
apartments get robbed from time to time.)

But, in any event, Jones is pulling the plug on
Groklaw.

So the government's surveillance programs have cost us
another small but tangible loss.